Google announces real-time search and Bing is back to the drawing board.

Microsoft Bing is back to the drawing board to device new schemes to thwart the big Google. Not long ago, Bing announced it had reached an agreement with Twitter and Facebook to include updates from both services in its search results. We all thought that was a smart move considering the fact that search is now moving to real time thanks to Facebook, Twitter and other similar services.

However, if you thought Bing’s move was preemptive against Google, then you are in for a surprise. Google has just announced “…features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web.

“Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.” Is there a better definition for real-time than what Google is telling us?

If you thought Bing had scored great points by signing an agreement with Twitter and Facebook, again you are in for a surprise. Google has gone farther. They have signed Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Jaiku, FriendFeed and Identi.ca (phew!) for content indexing. According to Big G, the new features will be available in English in the next few days. “You can [however], try them out today by visiting Google Trends and clicking on a “hot topic,” which in most cases will bring you to a search results page with the new real-time feature.”

Hold it, that’s not all. The voice search capabilities on Android now recognizes the Japanese language. In addition, your location can now be used to suggest to you “what’s nearby,” Google Goggles for searching objects using images rather than words on via your camera phone. The Googleplex no doubt, must have been real busy today :-). So there you have.

Next time when you search on Google, the publicly available updates of the over 350 million Facebook users, the close to 100 million Twitter users and all the other services mentioned above will be searched to give a result that reflects ‘what is happening now!’ as is now the Twitter mantra. This is getting interesting and we can only wait to see what Bing comes up with later against this heavily heavyweight.